Middle East

President Trump announced today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—“JCPOA”). Here are talking points sent out by the White House. President Trump is terminating United States participation in the JCPOA, as it failed to protect America’s national security interests. · The JCPOA enriched the Iranian regime and enabled its malign behavior, while at best delaying its ability to pursue »

Fresh from attacking President Trump for congratulating Vladimir Putin over his re-election, the mainstream media now tut-tuts Trump for congratulating Egypt’s Abdel Fatah al-Sissi. For example, the Washington Post’s story notes, pointedly, that “Barack Obama declined to invite Sissi to the White House because of concerns about his human rights record.” However one views Trump’s call to Putin ( this was my take), Sissi stands in a very different position. »

…comes from Saudi Arabia. Shiite rebels in Yemen fired an Iranian-manufactured missile at the royal palace in Riyadh. It was intercepted, reportedly, just seconds before it reached its target. This follows a similar attack last month, where Yemeni rebels claimed responsibility for a missile that was aimed at Riyadh’s airport but was also shot down. These incidents highlight the fact that the Gulf’s Sunni countries no longer care much about »

That’s the headline of an article in the New York Times. To which I say, “ya think.” The point is so obvious that it took three Times reporters — Anne Barnard, Ben Hubbard, and Declan Walsh — to make it. They write: [A]s Arab and Muslim leaders raised their voices to condemn [Trump’s decision on Jerusalem], many across the Middle East wondered if so much had changed in recent years »

John Roche, who served as an aide to President Johnson, once described Johnson’s reaction when a Democratic Senator on the Foreign Relations Committee (Roche withheld the name, and I won’t speculate) broke with LBJ on the war in Vietnam. According to Roche, Johnson said something close to this: It’s my own fault. Some years ago, the good people of ______, in their wisdom, elected the village idiot to the Senate. »

In recent years, one catastrophe has followed upon another in the Middle East. In a bracing essay authored for Power Line, David Horowitz lays blame where it belongs, at the feet of the Obama administration: During the eight years of the Obama administration, half a million Christians, Yazidis and Muslims were slaughtered in the Middle East by ISIS and other Islamic jihadists, in a genocidal campaign waged in the name »

Last week, the Washington Post dedicated an entire section of the paper to airing Palestinian grievances and talking points. The section was called “Occupied: Year 50.” This week, the Post was back with more, turning the first five pages of its Sunday “Outlook” over to Dan Ephron so he could whine about Israeli settlements. I don’t recall anyone ever getting five pages in “Outlook” to write, or in this case »

Today, the Washington Post dedicated an entire section of the paper to airing Palestinian grievances and talking points. The section is called “Occupied: Year 50.” One of the stories is about a Palestinian cancer patient whose children can’t get into Israel to visit her. Another shills for a Palestinian real estate developer who is building a planned city on the West Bank but fears the Israel Defense Force will thwart »

No, not as a general matter. But when it comes to Middle East, he may be. Consider this statement by the Secretary of State: We solve the Israeli Palestinian peace dilemma, we start solving a lot of the peace throughout the Middle East region. We’ve been railing against this sort of nonsense for almost the entire 15 years (as of this weekend) of Power Line’s existence. Tillerson’s statement is a »

Here is the text of President Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia to heads of dozens of Muslim-majority states. The speech is excellent. Trump’s approach to the Muslim world in this speech aligns, in general terms, with his approach to other less than friendly world actors. As with China, to name one, Trump eschews past hostile rhetoric and assumes (or pretends to) the best in the hope of securing assistance in »

Michael Ledeen wonders whether President Trump has “a strategy to win the global war.” Michael discerns none. Instead, he sees our enemies and adversaries making inroads, while the U.S. counters mostly with words and, in the case of Russia, “the usual sanctions.” What is our policy? It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. We say we want Iran out of Syria, but we’re in league with the Iranians in some »

Today, John Kerry delivered his “much anticipated” (by the media) oration on the Middle East. It was long and it was timeworn. Herb Keinon of the Jerusalem Post reports: What a tired-looking, hoarse Kerry did for more than an hour was pretty much compile the “greatest hits” from numerous speeches he and US President Barack Obama have given over the last number of years on the Mideast. He talked about »

Obama had barely lowered his hand after being sworn in back in 2009 that Glenn Reynolds proposed that a re-run of the Carter presidency was likely a best case scenario for the lightworker, and while this has been manifestly true for quite a while now, yesterday’s UN vote seals the deal. I dimly recalled that Carter made a similar move in his last year in office, voting to abstain on »

And if so, when will you stop? That’s the question that might well come to mind when taking in the results of a recent World Values Survey on the question of whether wife-beating is ever justified. Let’s go to the tape: I had no idea they had so many Super Bowls over in the Middle East. Special bonus correlation: More here from Jason Richwine. »

At the beginning of his first term, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton announced a foreign policy “pivot” to Asia. Unfortunately, events refused to pivot with Obama and Clinton. Like the oceans that declined to recede, the big events stubbornly remained were they were — in the Middle East, as every intelligent analyst expected they would. Civil war in Syria, the rise of ISIS, Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons »

Dennis Ross is a respected, if thoroughly conventional, expert on the Middle East. A Democrat, he has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations as an adviser and envoy. Ross served in the State Department as Hillary Clinton’s Special Advisor for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia. Subsequently, he joined President Obama’s National Security Council staff as a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the Central Region, »

Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reports that President Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are “soul mates.” Why? Because Obama “disdains. . .needy, showboating allies and [Merkel] is neither.” That’s hilarious. Who on the world stage is more of a showboater than Barack Obama — he of the speech in front of Greek columns, the shockingly pretentious Cairo lecture to Muslims, and the receding ocean tides? Obama’s “disdain” for »